As expected, Senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul blocked a last-second attempt on Sunday to pass a new law that contains a reformed NSA phone data collection program. But the surveillance program could be back in place in a few days.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell agreed to support the House-approved USA Freedom Act over the weekend, in a last-ditch effort to prevent parts of the controversial spying program from expiring in its entirety. The Senate voted 77-17 in favor of proceeding to vote on the act.
However, since the Senate requires the unanimous consent of its members for certain procedural moves, Paul was able to block an immediate Senate vote on the House measure. Experts believe a vote will get to the Senate floor sometime this week, but for now, the massive phone-data collection program remains in limbo, and three parts of the program are shut down.
Surveillance will certainly continue under other parts of the act and under other government programs designed to combat terrorism, but the shift of data-collection programs to private phone companies from the NSA, under the proposed USA Freedom Act, awaits further Senate action.
“The point we wanted to make is, we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution,” Paul said on the Senate floor. “I’m supportive of the part that ends bulk collection by the government. My concern is that we might be exchanging bulk collection by the government [with] bulk collection by the phone companies.”
The most-controversial of the three provisions that expired is Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which allows the NSA to obtain and store “any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.”
The controversy over Section 215 erupted in 2013 when former NSA analyst Edward Snowden disclosed a massive government system to harvest Americans’ phone records, which is authorized by a secret court. The NSA system uses blanket court orders, and not specific search warrants, to compel phone companies to hand over customer metadata to the NSA.
The phone metadata contain basic phone number information, and not the content of calls or the names of callers. But that in itself, critics say, violates the First and Fourth Amendment rights of Americans since the information isn’t obtained via the warrant process.
The House’s USA Freedom Act shifts the burden of keeping the phone records to private companies and forces the NSA to get individual permissions from the secret court to get relevant, targeted information from a phone company storing the records. It also provides for an adversarial advocate in the secret FISA court.
